Rewatch...still brutal. 35mm brings out the tactile quality that Huszárik was going for. The most striking part of this for me still is not the abattoir/executions but the melancholy carousel music played over the white horse running in circles. We instinctually want to compare this to The Blood of Beasts but I think it pairs perfectly with Au Hasard Balthazar.

a cacophonic embroidery that seamlessly shifts, very quickly, through an arc of nostalgia, fear, and death. cracked pavement, stone paths, and dark trees brilliantly juxtaposed against branding, scars, and murder.

Elegy to a lost world, to the lost soul of the world still in our hearts and eyes but lost to our conscious minds. The horse as symbol of our soul's freedom and true nature, symbol of the power of nature that we fear. John Berger would appreciate this film. There is no prelapsarian state, there is only our truest nature which is still accessible, and our daily abstraction and suppression of it is the root of tragedy.